Who Fed the Tiger?

Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland could destroy five of the six major U.S. air bases in the Far East. So states a new report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, adding:

“Saturation missile strikes could destroy U.S. air defenses, runways, parked aircraft, and fuel and maintenance facilities. Complicating this scenario is the future deployment of China’s anti-ship ballistic missile, which could hold U.S. aircraft carriers at bay outside their normal operating range.”

Opposite Taiwan, China’s missile force has reached 1,600.

Beijing is also building rockets, submarines and surface fleets to extend her dominance out to the third chain of islands, enabling the People’s Liberation Army to strike U.S. carriers and bases as far away as Guam.

Since the demise of the blue-water navy of Russian Adm. Sergei Gorshkov, the Pacific has been an American lake. No more.

China lays claim to all the Paracel and Spratly islands of the South China Sea, all the Senkakus in the East China Sea, and all the oil and gas beneath and around those islets and reefs.

America’s offer to mediate these claims, which involve half a dozen other anxious Asian nations, has been rudely rebuffed by Beijing.

At the G20 gathering in Seoul, South Korea, Barack Obama got an earful from China about the Fed sinking the dollar and learned that Beijing would not be revaluing its currency to help with our chronic trade deficits.

As China holds a huge share of U.S. debt, Obama is not about to get sassy with our banker, who might just cut off the credit America, running a budget deficit of 10 percent of gross domestic product, desperately needs.

Napoleon said of the Middle Kingdom, “Let (China) sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” The shaking has begun.

So the question arises: Who put us in this predicament? Who awakened, fed and nurtured this tiger to where she is growling at all Asia and baring her teeth at the United States? Answer: the free trade uber alles Republicans.

Richard Nixon opened China. His 1972 Shanghai communique pointed inexorably to what Jimmy Carter did in 1979: break relations and abrogate our security pact with Taiwan, and recognize the People’s Republic as the sole legitimate government of China.

In 1982, the Ronald Reagan White House signed on to a communique with Deng Xiaoping’s China by which we agreed to reduce and eventually end all arms sales to Taiwan as tensions in the strait diminished.

Under George H.W. Bush, Beijing’s crushing of the Tiananmen Square protest with tanks was not allowed to interfere with business.

Repeatedly, Republicans voted to extend most-favored-nation status to China. Dissenters were castigated as “isolationists and protectionists.”

Under Bush II, the GOP made MFN permanent and sponsored Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization, despite China’s downing of a U.S. surveillance plane and incarceration of its American crew on Hainan Island. Colin Powell was forced to apologize.

For decades, corporate America championed investing in China and trade with China, though the massive transfer of U.S. factories, technologies and jobs was clearly empowering China and weakening America.

Now, with U.S. political, military, industrial and strategic decline vis a vis China manifest to the world, we hear the wails of American businessmen that they are not being treated fairly by the Chinese. And the politicians responsible for building up China are now talking tough about confronting and containing China.

Sorry, but that cat cannot be walked back.

Review commission chair Dan Slane says his members have concluded that “China is adopting a highly discriminatory policy of favoring domestic producers over foreign manufacturers. Under the guise of fostering ‘indigenous innovation’ … the government of China appears determined to exclude foreigners from bidding on government contracts at the central, provincial and local levels.”

Imagine that! The Chinese are ignoring WTO rules and putting China first. Don’t they understand how the Global Economy works? You’re not supposed to tilt the field in favor of the home team.

One knows not whether to laugh or cry.

The policy the Chinese are pursuing, economic nationalism, was virtually invented by the Republican Party. Protectionism was the declared policy of the GOP from the day its first president took office in 1861 to the day Calvin Coolidge left in 1929.

Free trade was the policy of a Great Britain whose clocks those generations of Americans cleaned, even as the Chinese are cleaning ours.

As for a U.S. policy of containment, we have no vital interest in China’s border dispute with India, or Beijing’s claims to islands in the South and East China seas, or in China’s claims against Russia dating to the ninth century.

Time for our Asians friends to take responsibility for defending their own claims. As LBJ said in 1964, “We are not about to send Americans boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” This time, let’s mean it.

You’re right on, Pat. As you point out, every U.S. President has contributed to this debacle, starting with your old boss, Richard Nixon. The ironic part is that we adopted a completely opposite approach to the Asian communist dictatorship than we adopted toward the Eurasian communist dictatorship, for reasons I cannot fathom. The only difference is that the Eurasian communist dictatorship disappeared in 1991. What I never understood is why these Presidents thought making Communist China wealthy by opening our markets to it would somehow work to the benefit of the U.S. I also never understood why anyone thought that U.S. workers could compete against Chinese (and Indian) workers making a fraction of their pay.

Along these same lines, there is this passage from an article posted on Yahoo today:

“””[David] Johnston, also the author of Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense, criticizes our free-trade practices as costly arrangements that are not really free, especially with China, but rather “labor arbitrage.”

Pat the “globalist” day has indeed come and gone for the reasons you cite. Since Nixon(sorry Pat) , our Presidents have bowed down to the Emperor. Having said that, you set forth the situation that the Chinese could Pearl Harbor our Asian bases. Using your logic developed so well in books that you’ve written, what the heck do we have bases in Asia for anyway? Okinawa, are we still there? Korea? How about the Koreans paying for defense of the peninsula and we putting an embargo on Korean immigration and Kias/Samsung, etc. That would be sensible 21st century nationalism. Along with a rolling embargo of Chinese products that would halt when China stops subsidies to its industries. (Like never). The currency fixation with China of Geitner and Bernanke only is a cover for their utter cowardice.

They, like the Bushes, Romney, Fox Business News (Murdoch who is all over Asia) the Clintons, Obama, Palin and the US Chamber of Commerce would never want to block cheap Chinese goods from our markets, no matter how many Americans and cities are devastated by unfair trade.

I think as soon as China feels secure in its ability to dominate over all of the East Asian nations, that it will attack India which it sees as its only real competitor and obstacle for total world dominance.

Or maybe it will go after India first for more surprise in a massive attack. It does have 25 types of drone aircraft now that can shoot missiles that it could use to swarm India before it even knew what was happening.

We should have voted Pat in and this mess would have never happen and we would all be wealthier and still have our livelihoods from textiles to steel and future,Donald Trump and Lou Dobbs need to get together for a 2012 tea party run and put the Builder burg group back where it belongs,over seas,put out to sea,also we need to get out of the evil American hating WTO,pascal lamy,that empty suite of a european.,protect our boarders and sovernty,no more Tresinist Presidents, it is U.S first.

What the US needs is an industrial policy. When the last US factory producing a product shuts its door, the technology goes out the door with it. The last U.S. rail passenger car manufacturer, the Budd Co., ceased operations in 1987. Under the myth of American economic dynamism, there should have been entrepreneurs ready, willing and able to step in and start producing subway cars. There haven’t been any.

The last US microscope manufacturer, American Optical Co. of Buffalo, NY, ceased production around 1980. Click here to see one of their last ads. Japan has at least 5 microscope manufacturers (Olympus, Nikon, Canon, Meiji, Topcon). Japan has that number because MITI, their arbiter of industrial policy, makes corporations share their technology. You can also buy a top-of-the-line German made microscope (Zeiss) or even a Russian one (LOMO), but forget about any such US product.

Both of the established parties shun any type of industrial policy; the Republicans because that would entail “picking winners and losers” and the Democrats for fear of being labeled “socialists.”

Until such time as we adopt an industrial policy, China, Japan, South Korea, et al will continue sucking the life blood out of our economy.